The Rebrickable-hosted Premium MOCs feature was introduced in late 2017 when Mocplans shut down. There were thousands of LEGO fans who needed access to the building instructions they had purchased, so Rebrickable started hosting them. At the same time, it became possible to submit new MOCs using this hosting method. This is now our preferred way of hosting Premium MOCs (vs self-hosted where the designer has to serve the files and handle payments), and so I have spent a lot of time lately focusing on improvements to make it fully competitive with other digital sales platforms out there.

I have just released the first round of new features described below, with lots more planned over the following months.

Premium MOC Discounts

You can now setup Discounts for your Premium MOCs. These are intended as temporary promotional sales events for your MOCs. To setup a Discount, go to your Settings > MOCs page and find the Create Discount button.

Discounts run for a short duration and can be applied to one or more of your Premium MOCs. Everyone who buys your Premium MOCs during that Discount duration will get the lowered price.

Due to the promotional nature of Discounts, there are restrictions in place to prevent designers from simply hiking prices and running permanent "sales".

Durations must be between 1 and 14 days

The Discount % can be anything, but impacted MOCs cannot be reduced to below $1/€1/£1

Discounts cannot be applied to MOCs within 30 days of being published

Discounts cannot be applied to MOCs within 30 days of a price increase

There must be at least 60 days between consecutive discounts, regardless of which MOCs they apply to

Once the Discount has started, it's details cannot be edited other than to cancel it early

Finding Discounted MOCs

To promote your MOCs that are on sale, there is a new tab on the Browse MOCs page for Discounted MOCs. The algorithm to show MOCs here is based on a combination of largest discount, best selling and most liked MOCs. I'm sure I will end up changing it around a lot as I get a better idea of how much this new feature gets used.

There is also a new option in the Search MOCs page to filter on discounted MOCs to help narrow down what people search for.

MOCs with an active discount can be identified by the red label showing the discounted percentage.

Premium MOC Coupons

Discounts are applied to everyone equally. You can also setup Coupons which you can use to control who has access to the discounted prices. For example - previous customers can be given a Coupon for future MOC purchases.

Coupons can run for as long as you like, and you can edit them at any time.

On every Premium MOC there is now a "Have a coupon code?" link. Clicking it expands the input field where the buyer can enter their code.

Clicking Update Cost will apply the code, in this case for 20% off.

You can also add a coupon_code parameter to the URL for a MOC to have the Coupon Code pre-applied, eg: https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-0001/Nico71/trial-jeep/?coupon_code=20OFF

Designer Marketing Messages

Discounts and Coupons are great for promoting your MOCs, but the tricky part is getting your customers and potential buyers to see them in the first place. To help with this, you can now send messages in bulk to all of your previous customers - i.e. anyone who has bought your Premium MOC instructions on Rebrickable.

Of course, to prevent misuse there are limits here too. You can only send one bulk message per day. Users can also choose to opt out of them.

From your Private Messages - Inbox page, you will see a new button "Send Bulk Message to my Customers" if you have sold any Premium MOCs.

You can select one or more MOCs to target, and format the message however you like.

To opt-out of receiving these messages from MOC Designers, there is a new setting in your Notifications tab called "Promotions from Designers of MOCs you have purchased" which can be disabled.

Google Analytics Integration (Designer Plan)

If you are on the Designer Plan, you can enable Google Analytics on your MOC pages to collect anonymized data about your traffic sources and visitor behavior. You will need a Google Analytics account and a tracking ID from Google Analytics that you enter in to your profile settings.

You'll need to create an account in Google Analytics if you don't already have one. Or, if you do already have an account tracking an existing site, you can add an extra property to it just for Rebrickable analytics.

To enter your tracking ID, go to Settings > Personalisation and find the Google Analytics Tracking ID field: Enter your ID and tab/click out of the field to save it automatically. You will start seeing any traffic to your MOC pages show up in the real-time data in Google Analytics.

Social Media Promotions (Designer Plan)

I use the Rebrickable social media pages (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram) to promote new MOCs that I think will attract attention. There are too many MOCs submitted each day for me to post all of them so I usually post just 2 or 3 per day. However, I'm lazy and don't want to do that every day so I use a tool called Buffer which lets me queue up a bunch of posts once a week and it will post them out on a defined schedule. This has the side effect that it usually takes 1-2 weeks for new MOCs to appear on my social media pages.

If you are on the Designer Plan, I share every single MOC you submit. What's changed is that I have now automated it so that once your MOC is published on Rebrickable it is automatically pushed to the front of the Buffer queue. Meaning - your MOC will be shared on Facebook etc within hours of it being published.

There is also a new setting for anyone on the Designer Plan under the MOCs tab where you can enter your Facebook and Twitter page handles. If set, these are used in the Facebook/Twitter posts, allowing the thousands of Rebrickable followers to visit your own social media pages.

Free MOC Hosting

When you submit Premium MOCs, Rebrickable can store the files for you. Free MOCs have historically required you to upload them to your own website or an external file sharing site. While this helped to keep Rebrickable costs down, it causes problems when the external sites are no longer accessible, and can be a hurdle if you don't have anywhere else to put the file.

Now, you have the option to upload your file(s) during the Free MOC submission process too.

That's it for now :) I hope these new features find good uses. There are more planned over the coming weeks/months.

Hi, only one question about the MOC discount. How can I retrieve the price increase date ? If I'm not wrong in the change log inquiry page it's not specified this information, and honestly I don't remember when I've applied all the price increases ... Thank you.

Same here, I'm still somewhat new to this even after having catalogued 42,000 parts. But I'm really loving this site and the efforts to improve the service. I work for a company that builds a lot of their systems and functions from scratch or with API support... and they've got a whole corporation struggling to do what you appear to pull off single handed. Keep up the good work. I'll be subscribing monthly real soon (when I finish entering all my parts and then get around to my budget).

I've got a great team of admins who look after everything and let me focus on the code. Also, it's easier to build things when you don't have managers and stupidly restrictive change control processes in your way :)

I noticed that after i send a coupon i cannot send more messages to users... maybe the ones for coupon don't have to count :)I receive the messageErrors: Sorry, you are sending too many messages. Please wait a while before sending again.Also when re-editing a coupon it loses the mocs it's been associated to so you need to reapply. At least happens on coupons for all mocs.How many times can a user use a coupon?

The rebrickable hosted instruction are good idea, but the amount I receive from each transaction is cut WAY too much. From each 5€ buyer pays, 0,62€ goes to Paypal AND I'm charged 5€ by rebrickable after each 10 instructions sold. So basicly more than 20% is lost on way. I think it would be better if the payments went to rebrickable account, where you might get better paypal rates due to bigger traffic, cut yours % and send the final 4,50€ to me.

I have looked into PP fees and you are right, it is no longer based on traffic. Maybe it would be good to take a look into other way of payments, PP is way overpriced for such small transactions, because it is % + fixed rate that depends on currency and location. Don't take me wrong, I agree with the 10% commision, my previous post was a little bit too offensive, but I think it is necessary to point it out, because there are platforms with much lower fees.

Nice idea! But i have suggestions:- Generate one-time coupon- I can decide who can use coupon, by enter mail/s or nickname/s, or just for everyone who has coupon- Coupon -100%- When I make important instruction update, people who purchased it, get notification- When discount is active, but you really need to change something, this change must be check by admin

Yes I'm testing it out right now indeed, I send an end of Feb coupon.I guess the doubt in general (or at least mine) is that there is nothing to prevent that the coupon is spread to everybody. It might be a false problem but it can happen :) and the longer the coupon duration is, more it can happen.It can also be useful to specify how many times a user can use a coupon

As an addition it might be nice to filter users who bougth two or more for example to make special discount for them (this might be a plan feature)

I have a question about removal of the “self hosted” option (see below). Will this mean we can only upload our instructions thru this website if we want to share on rebrickable? If so, how large of a file are we able to share on rebrickable-hosted? I see a max of 1 gig (or 100mb), when sometimes files are larger than that. Will we be limited in uploading smaller files only

The Self-Hosted Premium MOCs option is planned to be phased out sometime during 2019. The Rebrickable-Hosted option is our preferred method and will be the only Premium MOC option in the future.

The suggestion is to make your MOC premium and tag it as freemium. You then provide a link in the description to the instructions. This means people can download it for free if they want or pay you the premium price. It doesn't provide you with exactly what you are looking for but it's someway towards it.

Great work as usual. I especially like the hosting for free MOCs feature as it cuts a step from the process of creating a MOC. Do you have plans to allow existing MOCs to change the instructions to hosted?

Yes, it was easier to submit a Premium MOC than a Free MOC which I suspect explains a number of them. Any existing Free MOCs can be changed to use hosted files, or changed to Premium MOCs or vice versa (except for self-hosted).